a freedom which were always wanting in
Flaubert. The latter, in his best pages, is always strained. To use the
expressive metaphor of the Greek athletes, he "smells of the oil." When
one recalls that when attacked by hysteric epilepsy, Flaubert postponed
the crisis of the terrible malady by means of sedatives, this strained
atmosphere of labor--I was going to say of stupor--which pervades his
work is explained. He is an athlete, a runner, but one who drags at his
feet a terrible weight. He is in the race only for the prize of effort,
an effort of which every motion reveals the intensity.

Maupassant, on the other hand, if he suffered from a nervous lesion,
gave no sign of it, except in his heart. His intelligence was bright
and lively, and above all, his imagination, served by senses always on
the alert, preserved for some years an astonishing freshness of direct
vision. If his art was due to Flaubert, it is no more belittling to him
than if one call Raphael an imitator of Perugini.

Like Flaubert, he excelled in composing a story, in distributing the
facts with subtle gradation, in bringing in at the end of a familiar
dialogue something startlingly dramatic; but such composition, with
him, seems easy, and while the descriptions are marvelously well
established in his stories, the reverse is true of Flaubert's, which
always appear a little veneered. Maupassant's phrasing, however
dramatic it may be, remains easy and flowing.

Maupassant always sought for large and harmonious rhythm in his
deliberate choice of terms, always chose sound, wholesome language,
with a constant care for technical beauty. Inheriting from his master
an instrument already forged, he wielded it with a surer skill. In the
quality of his style, at once so firm and clear, so gorgeous yet so
sober, so supple and so firm, he equals the writers of the seventeenth
century. His method, so deeply and simply French, succeeds in giving an
indescribable "tang" to his descriptions. If observation from nature
imprints upon his tales the strong accent of reality, the prose in
which they are shrined so conforms to the genius of the race as to
smack of the soil.

It is enough that the critics of to-day place Guy de Maupassant among
our classic writers. He has his place in the ranks of pure French
genius, with the Regniers, the La Fontaines, the Molieres. And those
signs of secret ill divined everywhere under this wholesome prose
surround it for those who knew